From the friendly caves of Pixie Hollow.

Are you trapped by your box, or do you stand on top of it?

This isn't an idle philosophical question.

When you're dealing with content, you're handling an intense business process. There is a lot of collaboration; you have you give thought to everything from creation to approval. You have to handle personalities, plan workshops, establish all kinds of procedures and policies, establish a Quality Assurance stage, and then make sure it all happens every time. And that you not only measure the outcome, but the effect of the process!

All these rules and regulations and efforts are your four-sided box.

Inside this box is your system.

The system helps your box stand up.

But at some point you might find yourself wondering whether you'd save a whole lot of cognitive effort by just ignoring it and running on the fly.

This is what I mean by wondering whether you're inside your box or standing on top of it.

If you're standing on top of your box, then the systems you've built are effortlessly supporting you to go exploring. They're the rock under your feet. They enable you to lift your nose into the air, to smell the jasmine wafting past on the early summer breeze, and to stretch out without feeling trapped.

If you're feeling trapped, constricted, uninspired, tired, or anxious, then there's a good chance that your system is failing you. You've fallen through the top of your box and the lid has trapped you inside in the darkness, and you don't know what's what.

You've got serious problems if you're stuck inside your box, let me tell ya.

When you're stuck inside your box, you'll flail about trying to fix it by doing anything except working on the system itself.

Who's got time for that? You'll snarl back. Look at this freaking mess.

Hate to tell ya, bub, looking at the system you're working with - and probably putting all your content production and maintenance on hold while you do so - is the only way to solve the problem.

So can you afford to put everything on hold?

Absolutely you can. It doesn't matter if you've got major deadlines riding on your back. If the system you've devised or got in place isn't working, then you'll be fighting an uphill battle to achieve that deadline anyway. You're far better off just going back to the drawing board and looking at your working environment. Who's involved, what they're doing, why they're doing it, how it all happens, where all the roadblocks are.

This is the heartland of content operations.

It's also the heartland of corporate content failure in small to medium-sized enterprises, where one person is trying to do the work of ten highly capable professionals.

The reason I'm telling you all of this is because the end of the year is fast approaching, and I want you to be mindful of your working environment. Now is the best time for you to start thinking about it, so that you can capture the information you need ahead of your summer-and-silly-season-downtime.

If you're not willing to do this, then you're probably not as improvement-focused as you think you are.

x Leticia "dropping truth-bombs" Mooney

PS. I'm available for content operations consulting and audits, so if this strikes a chord with you, simply reply to this email.